Menu

Trick or Street: Halloween Graffiti or Street Art Treat?

Halloween or not, my partner Sara and I have long called our basement the “dungeon.” Dark, damp, and dirt-floored, it’s one place in our house we’ve tried to avoid—a space only the seriously undead would want to endure on any remotely regular basis.

So when I returned from Pennsylvania this weekend to find our cellar transformed by Sara’s new found fascination with graffiti, I couldn’t decide for a moment if this was trick or treat—street art alive and well on the walls of our basement or some sad graffiti-ed commentary meant merely to mask the grit, grime, and ugly that had been our dearly departed dungeon.

Having gathered family stories that have haunted me for decades and survived the earliest winter snow storm Pennsylvania has seen in nearly a century, I’ll let you be the judge.

Leaving my aunt's farm just as the snow that paralyzed the Northeast began to fall

While I was gone on a memoir, fact-finding mission, Sara, along with my nephew Drew, covered the dirt floor with pea gravel, sorted the junk, and left the walls Halloween-ing a new, street-art-inspired look:

Yesterday, Sara even got me in on the graffiti transformation:

What my wall looked like before I began.

Graffiti may not be my artistic strength, but I tried.

Just as Halloween is a great equalizer, reminding the living how they’re haunted by death, so graffiti brings art out onto the street and into the gutters, to ordinary people who might never darken the doorway of a gallery or museum. Though Halloween has long been associated with vandalism, graphic or otherwise, the street art revolution has elevated the tagging of city streets to, perhaps, the most exciting and powerful movement the art world has seen in centuries.

Perhaps, it’s this that Sara has brought to our “dungeon” in time for the Halloween holiday, masking what we’d deemed terminally ugly with the stunning studio of graffiti-ed streets.

(To read posts I wrote about street art in Haiti click here and here.)

You’re right. It was, indeed, interesting, especially since I didn’t have a clue, and she didn’t hint at anything at all like this over the phone. It was fun, for sure. Thanks for reading, Rose–though I don’t think this is one of those days you said you were going to allow yourself to comment. But, it is good to hear from you, selfishly, I might add.

Dungeon no more! That graffiti sure brightens up the place.
The basement in my apartment building is very scary, complete with a big, loud boiler room and bare, flickering light bulbs. Sara to the rescue! Please!

Do you know about the Halloween room at the Biltmore Estate? Cornelia Vanderbilt (daughter of Edith and George), threw a fabulous party during the twenties that resulted in the painting of the brick walls in the cavernous basement. It’s still there, and it’s fabulous: http://www.galenfrysinger.com/images/biltmo17.jpg